Donald Trump Has Hijacked Democracy. The Response Is Up to the Country.

WASHINGTON—Most of it happened before dawn. The getaway cars were idling in the plaza in front of the Capitol, a chain of red taillights in the darkness before the dawn. The United States Senate was at work before daybreak, and United States senators wanted to get out of town. Their essential workday was over before eight. They took two votes. One was to kill the SEC's Resource Extraction Rule. The other was to invoke cloture on Betsy DeVos, the ridiculous nominee for Secretary of Education. The rule went down and DeVos went through and the sun had just begun to rise over the capital city and the weekend already had begun.

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It has not been a very encouraging week for democracy here, but there are a couple of lessons to be drawn from all the activity, and all the non-activity, that's taken place. First, and this has been obvious for a while, but it became vivid and clear over the past five days, there is absolutely no legitimate political opposition within the Republican party to anything the president* says or does.

His Cabinet selection is a ludicrous collection of the unqualified, the incompetent, and the destructive. Yet only DeVos, who is all three of these things, seemed to be in any danger of not being confirmed, and that danger likely passed on Thursday when Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who was said to be one of the last fence-sitters, said she had his vote. The situation is so preposterous that the Senate has had to delay the confirmation vote of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to be Attorney General, which is another kettle of botulism entirely, so that Sessions can stay a senator long enough to vote for DeVos. And still they might need Vice President Mike Pence to come down and break a tie.

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#NeverTrump has been a joke for several months now, but now that the administration is up and bungling, we see its real purpose. The Republican congressional majorities will put up with any excess and eccentricity down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue as long as they are allowed to put in place their plans to shove even more of the country's wealth upwards.

(If you get a chance, and you have no life, go to CSPAN and watch the press conference given on Thursday by Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin. He barely remembers the president*'s name. He has his own fish to fry.)

Remember Ben Sasse, the young senator from Nebraska who went to Iowa a year ago to campaign for any candidate who wasn't Donald Trump? I do, and so does Tiger Beat on the Potomac.

"We have a President who does not believe in executive restraint; we do not need another," Sasse continued in his statement on Tuesday. "I am not endorsing any candidate—I am urging conservatives to hold every candidate accountable to keeping their word so that we uphold the Constitution's system of checks and balances. I'm pro-Constitution and if that makes me anti-Trump, that's Mr. Trump's problem."

There has been no more reliable vote for everything this administration wants to do than Ben Sasse's, and he has been central to a strategy by which the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court has been used to camouflage the gross deficiencies of most of the remaining Cabinet nominees. But Gorsuch's resume doesn't make Sessions any less of a bigot, DeVos any less of an incompetent, or prospective Labor Secretary Andrew Puzder any less of a fast-food sweatshop proprietor.

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But all of them are going to go through, and Ben Sasse is going to vote for every damn one of them just the way he voted in the dark on Friday to advance DeVos' nomination and for passage of what Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, rightly called the Kleptocrat Protection Act of 2017.

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Second, it really is time to let up on the Democrats a little. I know it's frustrating, and it was generally awful to listen to Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp take the floor on Thursday to vote to kill the Stream Protection regulation of the EPA, especially when the two of them decided to take the salt-of-the-earth rhetorical dodge to defend the coal industry. Small towns, you know. Real Americans.

(In fact, that whole debate was surreal when you consider that it concerned an industry that likely will die before the planet it's helping to kill, but one that, somehow, has become the avatar for straight-shootin' smalltown Americans of all professions, obsolete or not. I think there's more concern for coal in Washington these days than there has been since 1902.)

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But, in general, even these two did all they could to throw sand in the gears of what the majority party was trying to get done. (Manchin and Heitkamp both voted with the party on the two pre-dawn votes Friday.) The Democrats fought as hard as they could in committee against these nominees, and with every tool available to them. (Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, emerged as a ferocious opponent of the Sessions nomination, and Oregon's Jeff Merkley may end up being the last man standing against Gorsuch.) They even forced the Republicans twice to change committee rules in order to approve nominees with Republican votes only.

There simply is only so much they can do, given their status in both houses of Congress, and the remarkable ability of the Republican majority to hold its votes together. They have pulled every delaying tactic available to a minority in the Senate and they've done so full in the knowledge that Mitch McConnell is perfectly willing to blow up whatever political norms—Hi there, Merrick Garland!—and change whatever political norms are in the way of getting what he and his president want. Right now, the administration has fewer Cabinet officers confirmed than any other administration at this point in the calendar. That's something, anyway.

The wires and pulleys by which Trumpism is hijacking democracy have been exposed. The rest is up to the country.

"Look, I'm headed home to Oregon," said Senator Ron Wyden. "I've had five town meetings when there was more snow in Oregon than any day since 1937. We had very big crowds with people really speaking out. Political change doesn't start in Washington, D.C. and trickle down. It starts from the bottom up, as people become aware of the facts.

"What's understood now, and it will increase, is they were told certain things in the campaign. Like with Obamacare. They were told there was going to be a repeal of Obamacare and a replacement. What we've really seen is repeal-and-run. They just wanted to repeal this program, get an ideological trophy, but they knew that just doing that would cause an enormous number of problems going forward. Looking for ideological trophies was not what the public was told during the campaign."

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Wyden is correct on the facts, of course, but he may be minimizing the primary "ideological trophy" that people wanted in the campaign and that the election of Donald Trump gave them—a defeat of That Woman, who was standing in for all of The Others who have made the world an insecure place for people who believed that their world should never be insecure at all. (That's for The Others.) That was all ideological trophy enough for them, and they got it in November. Now, we're all living with the consequences.

Both of the pre-dawn votes were bad ones. The DeVos nomination is ghastly on its face, but the vote on the Resource Extraction regulation is a vote for serious national security problems down the road. I know I'm harping on this a little but, if you allow American corporations to get back in the business of subletting despots all over the world, you're buying an awful lot of trouble down the line. You're going to have corruption and instability in the places under which resources we need are buried. You're lining up with people who loot their countries and then flee with their ill-gotten gains.

When this happens, you get more instability and more civil wars in which the only things on which both sides agree is that the Americans—or, more generally, the West—are to blame. Of course, this is also how you breed terrorists.

"There's no question that people's public health can suffer," Wyden said. "There is no question that you can have economic dislocation, and real economic pain, for families in a number of parts of the world where every day is an economic struggle just to survive."

They did all of this before the sun came up on Friday and then, for the most part, they were gone, off into a country that doesn't know what's happening to it, and seems to be happier that way, a land of constant surprises now, most of them bad ones.

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